Management by Baseball

What do Hall of Fame baseball managers like Connie Mack & John McGraw have in common with today's business leaders? Why are baseball managers better role models for management than corporate heroes like Jack Welch, Jamie Dimon & Bill Gates? And just what does Peter Drucker have to do with Oriole ex-manager Earl Weaver?
Management consultant & ex-baseball reporter Jeff Angus shows you almost everything you need to know about management you can learn from Baseball.

Tuesday, December 30, 2003

George Stallings' Epiphany:Team-Strengthening through Platooning

This entry is a re-issue from back
in late August I'm running because of a strong, parallel theme in
much of the e-mail I've been getting from new readers. The notes
are asking about baseball lessons for the people management side
(Second Base in the MBB Model), but specifically not
the "soft" side of people management (morale, conflict
resolution, etc.). The requests were for "harder" techniques, more like getting more productivity
out of the people one still has, or being able to cover all the
required work after a recent or upcoming layoff (December and
January 'tis the season, afterall). To those of you who wrote, if
this isn't quite the kind of method you were looking for, let me
know, but be explicit.

Something dull and undermining happens to organizations when
they get big enough to use job descriptions....they frequently
use them by misusing them.

When managers build a department or project team, too often
they pull people off piles as though it was simply a big construction
project: "I need 17 carpenters, two finishers and a roach
coach driver". That presumes every person is roughly
identical, a commodity, and therefore interchangeable.

Non-baseball managers could get much higher performance out of
their groups and project teams if they followed the lead Baseball
has supplied. Consider job descriptions, but monitor all the
individuals you manage to measure their strengths and weaknesses.
Whenever you apply a person to a job, consider what they don't do
excellently that they could use help with.

Finding someone to complement a team member is something
managers outside of baseball should do more often than not. Its
not done normally, but its an easy innovation that requires
only applying the knowledge of the teams individuals, and
keeping in mind which tasks are the most critical (so you can
pull someone briefly from a less important task to temporarily
partner her with the team member on a more critical task who
needs a complement). Seem complicated? Consider how (and why)
they do it in baseball, and how it started.

That finding a complementary partner in baseball is most
frequently platooning: pairing two players who bat
from different sides of the plate at a position. The first
noteworthy success with this approach was made by manager
Gentleman George Stallings of the 1914
Boston Braves, one of the things that led them to their name
The Miracle Braves.

Stallings signed on to manage the Braves for the 1913
campaign. They were 69-82, and finished in 5th place.
His best hitting outfielder, the aging and talkative Silent
John Titus, retired at the end of the season, undermining an
already below-average offense. Going nowhere fast, and without
resources to simply acquire stars, it was the perfect environment
to experiment. Stallings must have been carrying the
mass-platooning idea in his breast pocket for a long time, but in
1914 he decided to platoon at each of his three outfield
positions, according to Bill James. Most games, this meant
resting a man against the pitcher who threw from his side (for
example, resting a lefty hitter against a lefty pitcher, on the
average avoiding a tougher match-up for his batter). It appears a
couple of the early platoon partners (one, a 36 year old retread
brought in apparently just for the experiment) didnt work
out well, but instead of giving up on the experiment, the team
traded for a couple more potential platoon outfielders.

The 1914 Braves finished in 1st (94-59) as a result
of several things, including improved offensive contribution from
their outfield. They then tore through the dominant franchise of
the time, the Philadelphia
As in the World
Series, taking four straight games.

According to James, the eccentric experiment combined with the
out-of-the-blue (actually out of the blue and red, the
Braves colors that year) miracle season almost
revolutionized roster construction for the next 25 years 
every manager had platooning with successful end results shoved
in his face. Basically, James said, it became a given that teams
platoon at one or more positions.

Eventually, there was push-back from two factors, one that
would affect your ability to do this in non-baseball
organizations, and the other, I believe, wont.

First, there was the natural law of supply. Stallings
had no competition for marginal players with one or two very
positive aptitudes; competitors were looking for all-around
talent. So Gentleman George was free to browse at his leisure
through he remainder pile, looking for players who had specific
skills that complemented the skills the players already on his
roster had. But once others noted the utility of platooning, it
was more like Filenes basement  a lot of stock, most
of it useless, but a surprising number of valuable things and a
horde of aggressive people competing to get them. Thats a
natural law of evolution, and theres a discussion in depth
on this topic in Chapter 14.

Thats not going to be a problem for non-baseball
organizations.

Second, and this will be a problem, is resentment and personal
insecurities. Platooned players want to play all the time. Early
on when you do this, your staff, especially the ones getting
help, will want to go it alone. They wont want to be
looked-upon as flawed or weak, and most wont want to admit
they need help at anything. Most organizations punish people for
not being Barry Bonds, so youll have to overcome this with
some politically-sensitive pilot projects and make a big fuss
when theyre over to show publicly you respect the efforts
of both the helper and the helped. One more thing; plan things
whenever possible so the helped person is the helper next time
 it eases ego problems and helps everyone on the team
recognize that everyone is a contributor.

And when you platoon, keep in mind Earl Weavers
approach. You dont remove all challenges from a person, try
to denude them of anything they havent had experience with
or failed with once. You expose them to things they might learn
to do well. Yankee manager Joe
McCarthys use of star catcher Bill
Dickey is a good example. Dickey hit left-handed, and like
most lefties, hit right-handed pitchers better than left-handed
ones. Bill James looked into the scoresheets and found Dickey
started 82% of the games where the opponents starter was
right-handed, but only 42% when the starter was left-handed.
Dickey still got to see lefties, but his team (and his own stats)
benefited from sitting out against many lefties.

Applying the complementary talents of your team players is a
powerful competitive advantage. Baseball is quicker than most
organizations to grab tricks like this, but if you choose to
learn from Gentleman George, Earl Weaver or Joe McCarthy, youll
have an edge because your competitors wont have the good
sense (or, let''s face it, the guts) to follow you.

12/30/2003 06:11:00 AM posted by j @ 12/30/2003 06:11:00 AM

Monday, December 29, 2003

Management by (Taking) Exception:An Actually-Smart Tom Lasorda Trick

It's easy to think of Los Angeles Dodger ex-manager Tommy
Lasorda as sort of a buffoon, with his tacky weight-loss
product endorsements, his radically-wacky vocal stance on U.S.
relations with Cuba, his unsubtle politicking inside Dodger
front-office moves.

I'll argue he was a quite acceptable field manager during most
of his tenure (1976-96) and that his reputation is below his
performance because of his off-field tackiness. There's one quick
management lesson: You almost always pay a performance price for
prejudice/bigotry in a competitive environment. If an
organization refuses to hire/promote more-qualified women or
ethnically-different people, or even just tacky guys like Lasorda
because they eat with their mouth open, or wear checked shirts
with striped ties and a double-knit-polyester suit, or they are
loud, they are restricting their options, and will
(probabalistically) be doomed to lower quality. Prejudice comes
in many flavors, and almost all of them exact a toll; it's like a
hole in your swing, a pitch you won't swing at that will be
called a strike when you let it go, not insurmountable, but
something your competitors can take advantage of.

But back to the main Lasorda lesson: Management By Taking
Exception.

A lot of management lessons are positive, that is, do this.
But there are easy and many times quick advantages in just not
doing what you have observed actions a predecessor or other
manager you have worked for has done.

Management By Taking Exception can be
valuable in giving individuals a chance to do things your
predecessor wouldnt. Sometimes, though, you can MBTE work
to the groups advantage by changing the clubhouse
atmosphere. Tom Lasorda, the bubbly, irrepressible manager of the
Los Angeles Dodgers from the end of 1976 through 1996 used MBTE
to create his management persona.

The manager Lasorda played for in the minors
who had the deepest impression on him was Clay Bryant. According
to Leonard Koppett, Bryant was a tyrant who used the fear
weapon to the utmost, without trying to teach or encourage
anyone. He would be a model for Lasordas idea of how to
manage: NOT THAT WAY"

1. Make a list of every
boss you ever had long enough to understand at least a
little.

2. For each, write every
weakness they had that was important and affected the work.

3. Now consolidate the
weaknesses together in one master list of shortcomings, blind
spots, omissions (some of the things on here could be
opposites  a manager who was too harsh and
another who was too nice or one who was too
impulsive and another who was too passive).

4. Walk through the
master list and for each attitude or conduct shortcoming,
think about what it would be like to not be that way,
and what it would be like to be the opposite. The opposite
is, of course, the easiest way to be different, but before
you latch onto that as a course of action, think about the
opposite. Could it be an equally flawed approach? For each
decision-pattern shortcoming come up with a couple of
alternatives. For example, alternatives to impulsive
decision-making might be "always require a group
discussion for observations and potential improvements to the
approach" meeting, or requiring yourself to do at least
an hour of focused research and exploration.

5. Put a check-mark next
to the ones that had the highest impact, and an 'X' next to
the ones that are likely to come up in your work. Transcribe
those ones with Xes and checks onto a list you can keep
handy.

6.
Pick a handful of things you think will be most appropriate
in this groups environment now. Start implementing. If
you have some success, pick a few more and implement them,
too.

MBTE
is a cool trick because it doesn't require a lot of creativity.
It's also super because you can start on it even if you're not a
manager. Paul
Richards, the White Sox and Orioles manager I've discussed
before, kept index cards for years before he ever got a
management position, and he kept a stack of them for things he wouldn't
do if he ever got a position of power. It was like an
encyclopedia of things to avoid, of conduct or decision-patterns
to reverse.

One
can take this approach too far, but it's a great jump-start in
new management work when you find out what your predecessor
failed at or didn't do well, and just do those things correctly.

12/29/2003 07:14:00 AM posted by j @ 12/29/2003 07:14:00 AM

Saturday, December 27, 2003

The 70's Braves Curse, or WhyTeam Owners Shouldn't Design Trades

"We
don't know who discovered water,
but we can be confident it wasn't a fish" -- Fr. John Culkin

A couple of National League teams were afflicted back in the
1970s and 1980s with a destructive trend that has not appeared as
strongly since: team owners who, having been very successful in
other endeavours, decide they can micro-manage team decisions
without first gaining sufficient background to do it well.

Ted Turner's early experiences as owner of the Atlanta Braves
made him behave as though he was nuts. One of the most successful
business-folk of the 20th century, he was used to making things
happen. And very quickly. Turning around the team was something
he cared passionately about, but his impatience led him deeper
and deeper into making decisions himself, decisions about
personnel and even on-field in-game choices. He finally appointed
himself manager (though the commissioner's office nuked that idea
pretty quickly). His increasing frustration about the team's lack
of what he considered visible progress made him say and do things
that, insufficiently informed with craft knowledge, led him to
make really bone-headed moves that outweighed the benefit of the
decent and good ones he made.

THE CAUSE FOR FAILURE

"Baseball men" (gender-specific back then) would
have told you Turner would fail, because he wasn't one of them. That's
not really why he failed. An outsider with a strong
background in a parallel discipline can even be at an advantage,
questioning assumptions both tacit and explicit that may have
been true in the environment in which they were made and cast in
concrete. Even as imposing and seemingly permanent set of
decision-making rules as the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments
need a little tuning to meaningfully adapt to the current
environment: In most North American neighborhoods, coveting a
neighbor's ox or man-servants probably would be more appropriate
as a neighbor's professional licenses or cable TV service.

So Turner was within his rights to second-guess his baseball
men and make decisions on his own. But. But not without
sufficient knowledge. He needed to acquire more baseball
domain-specific knowledge, and if he was going to throw away
"the Ten Commandments" of what his baseball men were
operating under, he needed to first experiment in small ways and
find the elements of the process that needed to be kept, at least
while he formulated something new.

To a breaktakingly alarming degree, contemporary executives,
when they're not too afraid to innovate, tend to take the binary
opposite extreme and fall right into the Bad 1970's Ted Turner
Zone.

KNOWLEDGE IS FUEL

My insightful peers at The Vision Thing blog
(I referred to them in the last entry and Effern has contacted me
and given me the go-ahead to point to them) point out the primary
reason contemporary executives fall into the Bad 1970's Ted
Turner Zone. It's the same reason Turner did: lack of sufficient
domain knowledge to be qualified to make the decisions. As the
Vision Thing's Effern said in a message yesterday:

I have noted that the
further up the hierarchy one goes in, say, presenting
a business case for something, the less words you get to use.

It dawned on me one day that our Senior Director wants
everything pretty
much boiled down to one word. "Good",
"Bad", "Profitable", "Loss
Leader", etc.

Once, someone on a project call told me that she had to
condense a 50-page
report on a prospective product offering into one page of
salient bullet points.
For the executives. Not that condensing huge documents is all
bad,
heck, we do it all the time.

But it was made clear to me that there was a lot of
"meat" in those 50 pages,
and trimming it down to one page, double-spaced, as bullet
points
was not exactly optimal.

There are two reasons this oversimplification happens, one is
good and the other, more frequent one is a negative. The good
reason is that the higher up one is thrust in a big organization,
the less total time one has to spend mastering any one thing.
Executives are always going to know less about the details of a
workgroup than the line managers of the workgroup. A good
executive would study enough to get the detail she needed and ask
line managers what additional details might be worth knowing in
making a decision. That would be acquiring enough mastery to do
an acceptable job.

Too often though, executive work has an element of
domain-laziness, a belief that "leadership" can replace
knowledge. That's a bad reason and it's pretty widespread in big
American decisions. Which is why they want bullet points and the
dreaded slide decks.

There are a tiny minority of exceptions, execs who are so
accomplished in a domain at a high level, they can read the tea
leaves (the handful of bullet points) and know almost everything
they need to know.

EXCEPTIONS

My first white-collar job out of college was as an aide to
U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson, who was one of that tiny minority of
executives who had both domain knowledge and an excellent
aptitude for pattern recognition. To snare a tiny morsel of his
time, you needed to schedule a week in advance. You'd put
together a legislative idea or a backgrounder for him, and you'd
schedule 15 minutes and get about six, at the most. You had about
30 seconds to tell him the idea and if you didn't come to a
conclusion quickly enough, he'd stop you. Nelson would ask
questions, always very tough ones, and if you didn't have the
answers, you'd have to go away for a month and do the research
(some of which was impossible to do). His great executive
survival skill was to deflect you, to deflect having to do the
legislative work. Amazingly, he was considered by his peers an
activist, because relative to the rest of them, he really was.
Earth Day, Wild & Scenic Rivers, a curtailment of wiretaps
without warrants, governmental energy conservation work were
among the dozens of accomplishments he led on. But to prevent
burn-out, he had perfected this deflection skill. But Senator
Nelson was a very rare exception who knew what he needed to know
to ask a tough question.

Occasionally, you'll hear about a baseball team owner who's
meddling in personnel or decisions he's not qualified to make.
Usually it's a guy who has had great apparent success in another
domain (Like Cincinnati's Carl Lindner) and who feels like it's
his right, his droit de seigneur.

If he doesn't have sufficient domain knowledge (and he usually
won't), like all these American big organization executives
drowning in their own mediocre and bad decisions they made armed
only with a handful of bullet points, he's like to underperform
or even fail.

It's potentially high-yield for a relative outsider to propose
or experiment with a new pattern borrowed from a different
endeavor. But start small and start with a lot more knowledge
than you can fit on one set of bullet-points.

12/27/2003 11:41:00 AM posted by j @ 12/27/2003 11:41:00 AM

Wednesday, December 24, 2003

Earl Weaver & Stochastic Evolution:Using Metrics Wisely

Last week I was writing entries about oversimplifying metrics,
the seduction in organizations that don't have a natural
appreciation of numbers being lured too heavily to a single
metric (a TOGN) that can overimplify reality enough to distort
it.

I was not as clear as I needed to be. Some readers of mine who
have a lovely internal corporate or government blog that I think
they're keeping sub-rosa wrote about those posts. Their
expressions made me realize I needed to clarify what I was
getting at. What's below looks like a quote, but I'm paraphrasing
their exact words to protect their identity (aloha-there...write
me and tell me it's okay to put a pointer to you and I'll use
your exact words and link to you).

I see the dangers of One
Big Number thinking, but I see that to the same degree there
are dangers in us not using productivity metrics. It's
mandatory for the manager tracking performance to take into
consideration the pattern the data paints, both for entire
teams and for individual employees. My data, for example,
indicated conclusively I wasn't delegating enough. I was
operating with the impression I was succeeding at that. And
then I saw the metric. Doh.

I think I gave the impression I was opposed to metrics or
expected them to be highly elaborate. Let me try to be clear
about management metrics and my experience with them.

A TOGN (The One Great Number) that attempts to boil down a
baseball player or an employee into a single, apparently
one-dimensional (though perhaps highly-inclusive) stat is a noble
effort. But it has a couple of severe shortcomings, even if the
observer can escape the seduction of simplifying one life into a
single column of numbers doesn't shut off the mind to more
nuanced realities.

LIMITATIONS OF TOGN

For one thing, a TOGN is foreordained to bleed out the
shading, depth and context of individual performance. The recent
Oakland A's, for example, pursued a TOGN strategy with pretty
good results, but they ended up with a team that, while it pretty
much accomplished what the TOGN was designed to do, was so
limited in subtle respects such as fielding and fundamental
baserunning that they found themselves losing some games they
felt they couldn't afford to. They didn't dump the pursuit of
players who fit their TOGN, they just started pursuing variations
on the theme, knitting in some other skills at the cost of some
incremental excellence as measured by their TOGN.

And for another thing, any TOGN, even researched to an extreme
degree, is designed for a specific environment in which it was
formulated. Evolution is inevitable, and it moves "the
optimum" stochastically, that is, unpredicatably and an
unpredictable rate in an unpredictable direction, though usually
not re-making every factor totally, overnight. An acute observer
using performance measurement systems built on several numbers is
more likely to catch the trend early than one glued to a TOGN
hyperoptimized to the "now" it was designed for.

BE LIKE WEAVER

That was a key part of the uncommon brilliance of Earl
Weaver, manager in a couple of stints for the Baltimore
Orioles. He was the original quoteable guy who pushed the theory
of a single and walk and a 3-run homer, a big-inning offensive
theory which provided great results because a) it worked and b)
other teams were still futzing around with little-ball. But
baseball evolved during Weaver's career, with ownership changing
the rules and the ball in ways that changed the benefit/cost
ratio of various strategies. Weaver was able to tune his biases
and metrics to be in harmony with the reality of what was going
on in his work environment on the field. [One
of the most remarkable accomplishments of Weaver's transcendance
as a manager, something so few beyond baseball every achieve, is
that the lessons of his first years of managing were turned
around radically right afterwards, and yet he adapted cleanly
enough to lead his team to 109 wins the next year in a radically
different environment. His first year was 1968, with rules
changes that amplified pitching and devastated hitting -- league batting was .230/.295/.340 and league ERA
was 2.98. In 1969 changes
induced walks up 44%, and the lessons that made
you effective the year before just weren't applicable. It's
nearly universal that outside of baseball, managers who learn an
early lesson are lashed to it, for better and worse, like Ahab to
the whale, like stock-brokers who came into the market in the
middle 90s, like French cavalrymen who learned tactics fighting
in third-world colonies and then had to fight in Europe in W.W.
I, like American strategists who developed their skills in W.W.
II and then faced third-world guerillas in Vietnam. Not Weaver.
Weaver never stopped using metrics, observing his team members,
observing the larger environment. And he never complained about
change; he simply used it as an advantage by seeing it more
quickly and adapting to it more quickly].

Bill James, the best known of the sabermetricians, both craves
a TOGN measure and fully understands the nature of time/change
being the enemy of a TOGN to deliver "truth". One of
his early creations was a stat called Runs Created (RC), a
valuable measure still widely used that took basic components of
offense (hits, walks, total bases and at bats) in a formula that
projected the run value of a player or team stat line. He came up
with an original formula, but soon realized while it held for the
year he developed it, the components' value changed over time, so
he ended up developing 14 different versions of the number that
tweaked the component values for various seasons.

If you have enough different numbers, you're more likely to
adapt to changing conditions than if you have just one. That's
because within a set of diverse measures, one is more likely to
pick up the change in the environment than the others. And seeing
a pattern in them that constitutes real success (not just a high
score on paper) means you're more likely to be able to use
regression studies to redefine a metric for success in an
evolving environment.

All that said, a TOGN is better than nothing. Too many big
organizations fall prey to binary thinking. I worked for a
supervisor at Microsoft who believed that because you couldn't
find a single number that delivered absolute 100% Truth, that no
numbers told you anything of value. I'm not exaggerating. He
wouldn't use project management tools because "in the end
it'll never come out (exactly) the way the timelines tell you
they will". Because it could never score 100, he believed it
was a 0. True, he was extraordinarily cognitively underqualified
to be a manager, but big organizations harbor lots of men and
women who operate this way, and also tend to reward them with
promotions. Give these metrics-rejectors an executive mandate to
measure, though, and they'll have you measuring a thousand
trivial factors every millisecond. Bang, Boom, Barf they go, from
one binary extreme to another, never finding an effective,
homeostatic point in the continuum from zero to infinity.

SUMMARY & ALTERNATIVE

So, process-mavens, let me summarize my attempted
clarification. Almost every kind of work that requires
a deliverable .and. needs to be effective .and. is being managed
should have some performance metrics developed to observe it. One
can develop a time-specific TOGN as a centrepiece, but develop
other numbers to give it texture and context and shading, but
don't present the TOGN as a stand-alone number lazy-minded execs
can focus on and miss the point.

A great example of a textured metric is the fairly complex
display Don Malcolm uses to describe starting pitcher
performances, his Qmax tables. Here's an
example of one for Greg Maddux, and here's a
glossary to describe its components. It's not so complex it's
crippling, but it's complex enough to slow down the rush to
judgement types up the hierarchy who would misuse performance
data out of laziness.

If the constituents of success started evolving because of rules changes, or because ownership started draining some of the Kickapoo Joy Juice out of the ball, or a new informal standard strike zone, that is, if what a starting pitcher did to help his team achieve wins, it would be obvious from a system like Qmax that the sweet spots in the matrix were shifting subtly, that the relative advantage of any given cell or group of cells was "worth" more or less.

That's a performance measurement system that is designed with texture, and evolution, built right in.

12/24/2003 07:06:00 AM posted by j @ 12/24/2003 07:06:00 AM

Monday, December 22, 2003

Either Flunking Negotiation 201Or Failing the New Guy

"There
are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate;
when he can't afford it, and when he can." -- Mark Twain

There are some drop-dead simple rules of negotiation. This is
not going to be about one of those. There are some rules of
negotation that anyone who has been in a position of
responsibility for a few months should never mess up. This is
about one of those. I don't know who is actually responsible for
the little implosion here, but someone really messed up badly,
and, unless there was an unusually self-destructive lie involved,
it's the kind of flub that's unforgiveable because it's totally
avoidable.

Last week, the New York Mets & the Seattle Mariners
appeared to have a deal I call a "toxic waste swap".
The Mets were going to dump their overpaid, never-was outfield
disappointment, Roger Cedeño, to the Mariners for Seattle's
overpaid, once-was-decent-but-no-longer third baseman
disappointment, Jeff Cirillo.

Both sides made the pre-official announcement, but then it
didn't go through. Apparently, Cirillo exercised his no-trade
contract right to prevent his being shipped to New York. His
reason: he wanted to be a starter, not a bench-player, and since
both the Mariners and Mets had made clear he'd be used only as a
bench player, he chose to stay where he was instead of move
across the country to be in a role he didn't want to be in.
Rather than uproot his family, or live separately from them, he
chose to be miserable at home insead of in New York.

Logical, given the lose-lose nature of his
"choices". But here's the unnerving note, quoted from
today's New York Daily Newspiece
from John Harper:

On Friday the Mets reached
an agreement with the Mariners to trade Cedeño for Jeff
Cirillo, but the Mariners third baseman invoked a limited
no-trade clause in his contract and vetoed the deal. A source
with knowledge of the deal said Bill Bavasi, the Mariners'
new GM, was caught by surprise, unaware that Cirillo could
nix the deal.

Perhaps it was Bavasi's fault for not knowing Cirillo's
contract. I have, sadly, seen many managers outside of baseball
make similar mistakes, speaking for some underling in a
director's meeting only to discover the underling wouldn't go
along willingly. The foundation of that mistake in the cases I've
seen as a consultant is usually what I call the "General
Haig Syndrome". It's an overpoweringly delusional,
self-aggrandizing belief that since someone reports to you, you
can make them walk happily on hot coals or into enemy machine
guns just because you told them to.

OTHER POSSIBILITIES

I don't believe that's what happened in this Cirillo case. The
language of the Daily News piece makes it look like no
Mariner front-office person re-read & understood Cirillo's
contract before they negotiated, because if they had, they
wouldn't have been surprised. Bavasi, as the chief figure on the
Mariner side will ultimately be "responsible", but
someone on his staff should have told the New Guy (who wasn't in
the Mariner front office when the deal was negotiated) that
Cirillo had a limited no-trade right in his contract.

There are two darker possibilities, one highly unlikely, and
one I've found to be somewhat common in competitive management
environments.

1) Cirillo was informed of the deal and was asked if he would
approve, and agreed verbally to the trade and then said
"no". He might do that to anger the Mariners enough to
grant him an unconditional release so he could negotiate another
deal without another team needing to compensate the Ms, which
would give Cirillo more latitude and choice in making a deal
(since the acquiring team would have one fewer party to please
and probably would have to yield less overall to make a deal).

While possible, this is actually highly unlikely. Cirillo is
not a construction worker who can just move to another city and have his behavior "disappear".
Baseball is a closed system, so the hypothetical other front
office would find out Cirillo had lied to his management. That
would add a layer of mistrust and overhead to negotiating with
him. This is a cost they might go to for a great player,
but not one who for five years was nicely above average, for two
years was average, and for two years has been just hanging on by
his fingernails and fielding skill. Also, it doesn't seem like
anything else he's done or fit his other behaviors.

2) Someone or some group of people in the Seattle front office
decided to humiliate the New Guy (Bavasi) by hanging him out to
dry in some kind of white-collar hazing ritual involving public
humiliation.

This is more common than you'd think, especially in
competitive environments where the number of available job
seekers is way more than the number of available positions. I
consulted to an investment group where they appointed one of a
staff of six to be acting group leader with the thought that he
might make a good permanent, but all the former-peers actively
worked to undermine him so that when he failed, each would have a
better chance to replace him. The cure for the investment group
was to anoint the acting leader permanent (because you can always
unmake it later, but for now, it makes intentional undermining a lower-yield strategy) and link the whole group's financial compensation to the
leader's success (because investment people are most often most-motivated by money; this wouldn't work as well for teachers or social workers or scientists).

I don't know if someone intentionally undermined Bavasi, if
Bavasi himself messed up or if Cirillo lied. But if it's not the
last possibility, someone just flunked Negotiation 201: Don't
speak for an employee without enlisting her to your plan first.

12/22/2003 06:21:00 AM posted by j @ 12/22/2003 06:21:00 AM

Saturday, December 20, 2003

The Mariners' New Xmas Toy Syndrome: A Classic Management Wipe-Out

In the past, I've written about the imaginary "first 100
days" the U.S. president gets to establish his term's tone
and successes, and how for real managers, that period is about
three weeks. I counselled how important it is you make things
happen in all the MBB bases (operations, people, self-management
and change) in those precious, few moments. But some take it too
far, and fall into what I call the New Christmas Toy Syndrome.

They get a new gig and immediately re-org, do layoffs, purge
vendors, and change the decor, the flow of work, the brand of
coffee. Sometimes (rarely) all this is necessary. Usually, it's
one of two things: 1) The new manager doesn't have a systemic or
clear vision but wants to establish herself as being "in
charge", or 2) the new manager is merely carrying out the
agenda of someone who hired him.

It looks to many observers that Bill Bavasi, the new
general manager of the Seattle Mariners, is on this particular
track. He's been hyperactive in the trade and signing area since
he was hired six weeks ago. Not a single one of the deals seem
to make sense, and the pattern clearly follows none
of the old or new team development models observers recognize,
including:

Sign a bunch of recognizeable names,

Use sabermetric theories

Build for power

Build for pitching and defense

Use succession planning to bring in two very young
players per season & let the veterans break them in

Replace your lowest/most disappointing performers with
those who have a chance to be your highest

anything else recognizeable.

These moves consistently change the team little, with one
partial exception, address no obvious team weakness (the
exception, the Ibanez signing, appears to be a measure designed
to halfway address the team's complete previous
lack of left-handed home-run hitting; Ibanez could be swell, but
he's not a guy opposing teams will change their tactics to try to
neutralize) upgrade the fade-prone team at no
position, and in all cases seem to spend above-market money to
achieve it.

Possible Explanations

I'm not saying there's no theory behind the Bavasi moves.
There well could be an innovation we haven't recognized yet and
that he's not spilling because if he did (like the Oakland As
g.m. did in Moneyball) it would immediately undermine
any advantage inherent in the approach. But it certainly looks
like there's no method, and that it's madness. I'm determined not
to judge Bavasi yet, but I am feeling queasy; the shipping of
cash to the Diamondbacks to sweeten their take on the
McCracken-Colbrunn deal when we were already taking the lesser
player at a position we didn't need another starter and we were
taking his over-twice-as-high salary. [insert Jon Stewart pulling
his collar out with a forefinger while twisting his head 80
degrees to the right and making a gulping sound here].

Art Thiel of the Seattle P-I suggested near the end of his column
yesterday that the unifying principle was warm-fuzzies, the
possibility that it is an attempt to assemble a likeable
team. This certainly would go far in explaining the proposed
Carlos Guillen for Omar Vizquel trade that fell through. Vizquel
was beloved when he played in Seattle years ago, and Guillen has
the reckless SUV driving scar on his record as well as having
contracted tuberculosis (a disease that still carries a
Neo-Victorian social stigma associated with homeless alcoholics
and heroines of 19th century French novels), a deal that had no
other observable advantage to Bavasi's team in price or
performance or future value.

The overall ethos has the appearance of the New
Christmas Toy Syndrome.

Venture Capitalists & Vroom-Vroom
Noises

Outside of baseball, it's fairly common, especially among new
managers who either have never before had a management gig at the
level of the new job, or who owe their job to an executive that
has an agenda they hired the manager to carry out. Because most
American managers are given little field-training the way
European managers are, while they need to take advantage their
first three weeks, they don't really know what to do. Like a
three-year old behind the wheel of his mommy's car, he's playing
with all the controls, twisting the wheel back and forth and
making vroom-vroom noises. Except too frequently, the
vehicle is moving down the road in traffic.

I worked for a company that fell into the clutches of venture
capital types. They brought in a president who had never had much
latitude in his previous executive roles. He had the skills and
world view of a bookkeeper/accountant. He took over marketing
because he had always wanted to. He did a round of unnecessary
layoffs because the other guys at the Young Presidents Club were
hot on the fad. He spun off one of the sinking-margin company's
high-margin products because...he never actually could articulate
why, but I suspect it was because it showed he could do that kind
of deal. Vroom-vroom.

Bill Bavasi has been a g.m. before and the team he helped
build went on after his tenure, the Angels, went on to win a
World Series. Maybe he's just doing the bidding of the team's
many owners and trying to carry out their diverse views of what
should be done.

My pattern-recognition skill just can't help but hear the
distant sound of a three-year old making vroom-vroom
noises in the distance.

12/20/2003 09:22:00 AM posted by j @ 12/20/2003 09:22:00 AM

Thursday, December 18, 2003

The Average is Not the GuyMalcolm un-Gilds the Lilly

In the last entry, I explained about the average not being the
guy and how seductive it is, especially for time-constrained
managers to jump on a TOGN (that may be completely valid and
useful in its way), and mis-apply it by using it as a stand-alone
Truth. That is, if you fall in love with the average, you're at
risk of missing key details that provide context and that may
lead to to mis-appraise performance.

A baseball case in point looks to be the Toronto Blue Jays'
trade of outfielder Bobby
Kielty to the Oakland A's for their #4 starting pitcher, Ted
Lilly. Kielty disappointed in Toronto last year, and had what
many term a "sophomore slump", a performance downturn
in the second year that follows a strong first year. (Some
commentators like to point this out as the common case, the norm,
and it happens a lot, but it's overhyped because once the pattern
is placed in the mind and given a name, whenever it pops up, its
more noticeable. The words "sophomore slump" then take
the place of analysis; they just use that and don't have to try
to understand why).

The Jays and As are both run by general managers who are
adherents of sabermetric analysis (the Jays' G.M., J.P. Ricciardi
worked for Billy Beane and the A's), so this is a real inside
deal.

On the surface, you have Kielty coming off a year that
surprised many with how ordinary it was, and Lilly coming off a
year that was quite good for a #4/#5 starter, a good stretch
performance, and a top-10 performance in strikeouts per 9 innings
pitched. On the surface, you'd have to say the Jays got the
benefit of probably-good, and the As look like they're taking a
chance.

According to Dave's swell
Baseball Graphs site where he presents Win Share numbers for
2003 players, Lilly is a 10 Win Shares guy and Kielty a 12 Win
Shares man. If you use Win Shares (a TOGN with lots of
intelligent research behind it) as a measure, the deal looks
pretty balanced

Unless you read Don Malcolm.

Don, co-headman of the (formerly published in book form) Big
Bad Baseball Annual, is a natural skeptic and contrarian. In
analysis, that means he always tries to look at things from an
angle others overlook, and his natural thinking/analysis pattern
is to dispute what others believe, especially if he suspects
they've just latched on to an idea without examining &
questioning it seriously. His writing is as punchy as any on the
web, his analysis systems and observations interesting and
context-sensitive. As I've mentioned before, he's the only
analyst outside of Flordia who suggested before the season the
Florida Marlins (now we can say World Champion Florida Marlins)
would be a very competitive team this year.

One
of his latest entries (you have to be dedicated to read his
blog...sometimes entries are frequent, sometimes sparse) is on
the Kielty-Lilly deal, and his analysis, again, goes to a zone
others haven't. It's a beautiful illustration of how the average
is not the guy.

He parses 2003 data for each player between stats accumulated
against "good" teams (.500+ records) and
"bad" teams (below .500).

He first looks at Kielty's performance:

When we do that for 2003,
we receive what is certainly a curious finding:

<snip>We focus on
major league performance and introduce something missing from
all other stat splits: quality of opposition.

Perhaps the risk is not so high. If you look at his record
against only the better teams and suggested he would hit close to
that against the poorer ones, you could believe his postential is
higher than his 2003 stats. If it's common for
batters to hit as well against below-average competition as they
do against good competition, then it wouldn't be far-fetched for
Beane to think Kielty might recover normal performance again
lesser teams, which would raise his performance to something more
like the .267/.396/.452 he put up against the better teams. It
isn't a guarantee, but nothing is guaranteed with human
performance in dynamic systems.

How about Lilly, though? Wasn't he really useful last year?
Back to Malcolm:

Following the current
conventional wisdom for evaluating pitchers, (Rob) Neyer
focused only on Lillys walks, strikeouts and ERA and
suggested that he will be a good #3 pitcher for the Blue
Jays.

Of course, we have more
tools at our disposal for analyzing starting pitcher
performance, and this is as good a time as any to use
em on Lilly. The most interesting breakout is, again,
one that shows his GvB splits:

There are some Big Bad Baseball-specific measures in here I
won't explain. If you're interested, go to his site where he
explains them. I find them perceptive and stimulating. But to
give you the nickel tour, Lilly pitched 90 innings against teams
that played .500 or better ball, and 87 against teams that
didn't. He gave up almost twice as many homers per inning to the
better teams, with an ERA over twice as high. His record was a
scary 3-9 against good teams, 9-1 against the lesser teams.

This doesn't mean Lilly is trash; you have to beat the bad
teams as well as the good. A creative manager could optimize
Lilly's value in the regular season by lengthening him a day
here, shorting him rest a day once in a while, so he could face a
higher proportion of weak teams. Of course, once you get to the
playoffs, he's not going to be very useful, since, by definition,
playoff teams are almost certainly .500+ teams. And since Toronto
is in the AL East with both the Yankees and Red Sox, that means
they're going to see a higher-than-average proportion of good
teams they really need to beat to make the playoffs.

A little more Malcolm on Lilly and the As:

In Lillys case, we
are clearly looking at what Sandy Koufax called
the Jekyll-and-Hyde syndrome. The term he used in
his autobiography, in fact, was the .500 pitcher.
This pitcher always seems better than he really is, because
his good games are so good. In Lillys case, all of his
really good gamesand this includes all of the games he
pitched last Septemberoccurred against sub-.500 teams.

For some additional
context, lets take a look at the GvB performance
records of the starters for the Oakland As in 2003:

As you can see, Tim Hudson
had a fabulous record against good teams in 2003, and as a
result was even more important to the As ability to
overtake Seattle than what has already been recognized.
Overall, however, the As starters were sub-.500 against
good teams (30-36); their bullpen (14-7) is what got them
over the .500 mark against them. And much of that was due to
their ability to win all of Hudsons non-decisions: the
As were 6-0 against good teams in those games, and just
8-7 in all of the others.

Lilly was not hit quite as
hard as the various pitchers used to populate the #5 slot in
the rotation (John Halama, Rich Harden, et al), but he is far
off the performance level of the As big three.

Pitchers who consistently
pitch this poorly against good teams rarely develop into
anything other than back-end rotation fillers. The Blue Jays
found this out last year with another ex-Oakland pitcher
(Cory Lidle), and theyll almost certainly find out the
same thing in 2004 with Lilly.

<snip>Lilly was so
good against bad teams that it tends to color the overall
perception of his performance, especially those crafted by
limited (and, frankly, downright evasive) analysis such as
the one provided by Neyer in his recent column.

It may not happen that Lilly folds up like a cheap card table
against better teams in 2004. He has a better defense behind him
in the outfield now. And predicting how a player will adapt to a
new park (Toronto's generally an offense-promoting park) is an
inexact art. But the deal looks more balanced than many analysts
have given Beane credit for.

How can you slice and dice your team players' performance to
uncover useful insights about them? Does Malcolm give you some
ideas?

12/18/2003 08:46:00 PM posted by j @ 12/18/2003 08:46:00 PM

Wednesday, December 17, 2003

Part Four of The Seductions (& Giant Sucking Sounds) of Metrics:The Average is Not the Territory

In baseball, we use a lot of measures/metrics to evaluate
players. One of the seductions I've writen about before is a
widespread lust for The One Great Number (TOGN). TOGN ranges from
Bill James' Win Shares to Baseball
Prospectus' EqA to Tom Boswell's Total Average.

The seduction is the idea that performance can, for the sake
of simplicity, be boiled down into a single number so that value
(in creating rankings, or setting value during negotiation, or in
assessing trades, or in granting awards, virtuous reasons all) is
easily described. The giant sucking sound, though, is that while
this method might make sense to a stockbroker in buying
or selling equities, or a property developer in sorting out
possible projects -- inanimate objects -- it's a very flawed
approach for evaluating human performance in any job that hasn't
been fully Taylorized
(stripped down to the most simple, uniform, repetitive task).

I'm not criticizing any of these baseball metric methods.
Their math seems to work very well in the general case. They
deliver many results that quickly add a small bit of knowledge to
our understanding of the overall value of a player's season or,
sometimes, career. But just as the
map is not the territory, the average is not the value.

Hiding the Truth

The single number can hide many more values than it
illustrates, because individuals who aren't in a Taylor-ized job
have many attributes. Mariner first baseman John
Olerud's career hitting is .297/.400/.470. This makes him a
high-on-base guy with some, but not very good power. That's his
average career performance. And it's the average of his averages.
If you boil him down to single number, you'd think he was pretty
good.

The average ignores him as a hitter. The challenge is, at any given point in his career, he's never
his career average. The average is not the guy.

The average ignores his context as an individual on a team. Last
season, he hit .270/.370/.390, not terrible, but awful for a
first baseman (a position at which teams usually hide guys
without a lot of mobility but who can add a lot of juice to a
team's offense). He brings a very effective glove to his
position, and this isn't reflected in his average (which is
another reason TOGN strategies hold attraction to people who like
metrics).

The average ignores him as an individual with an evolving context in each moment. But if you break down his performances facing left-handed and
right-handed pitchers, he's not near his averages against either.
He's a completely different guy against righties than he is
against lefties.

Rather than his overall average .270/.370/.390, against righties he's
.280/.390/.420. Now he's so-so for a first baseman. Against
lefties, he's .240/.320/.310, no so-so or even awful, but
sub-big-leaguer. Barbara Bush. With a Wiffle Bat. In Elton John
Sunglasses.

Makes one wonder why a professional organization with big
bucks on the line and some chance of making the playoffs would
roll him out there for 170+ plate appearances against left-handed
pitchers and (it appears after 20 minutes looking though
boxscores) never once pinch-hitting for him against a lefty. It's
not like he a has a recent history of hitting left-handed
pitching. His 2001-2003 consolidated numbers against lefties are
.250/.350/.360, essentially sub-mediocre offense from a first
baseman on a team that plans on winning its way to the
playoffs. (Against right-handers during that time, he's a
sweet .305/.410/.485)

The average ignores him in his specific role on his team. If Olerud was a shortstop or
center fielder with a great glove and those averages, he might be
a positive factor for a team. But again, it would depend on the
context of his team. Even if we pretend the average embodies the
person, its meaning changes radically based on context. What
might be an acceptable level of performance for a re-building
team that's conserving resources, would be wholly lacking for a
team whose plan is to try to squeak into the playoffs.

It seems his team thinks of Olerud as his career average (not
even his recent-performance consolidated average), and overlooks
the facts that (1) he is a usually-solid batter against righties,
and (2) consistently -- with a few exceptions -- hits like a
minor-league back-up catcher against left-handers. The average
seems to overwhelm the person it refers to. As a result, they
misuse him and it undermines the team.

SMALL NOTE, WITH IRRITATION: The M's had
one, lone guy on their roster who hit left-handed pitching and
played first base, and therefore, would have held some hope as a
platoon-partner so Olerud could sit against lefties instead of
being regularly humiliated and dragging down the team. The M's
traded that guy this week for a back-up outfielder whose salary
is twice as high, and they shipped money to the other
team for the privilege of acquiring this dude. So right now,
there's no obvious option to help Olerud out.

Outside of baseball, this
happens all the time.

Sales groups will develop metrics to evaluate sales-folk, TOGN
schemes used to set commissions. Customer service phone bank
sweat shops trying to ratchet up their miserable service to
hanging-on-by-their-fingernails-acceptable service will devise a
TOGN metric based on calls-processed (speed) and lack of
complaints. Big military equipment manufacturers will create TOGN
ranking systems for bonuses and layoff stacking.

And they all fail in assessing quality, because they look at
averages only and they ignore context against the environment in
which the performances that made up the average were played in.

Look, if a saleswoman bribes a purchasing agent at one single
big company, and closes a giant deal, while failing on every
other big company, her average sale number is going to be high.
She's not achieving anywhere as much as her co-worker who sells
one-eighth as much to each of eight different companies.

The phone service agent who rushes nine people off the phone
politely, providing no actual service but not earning a complaint
from anyone is going to look better than the agent who does that
with seven people but actually takes the time to helps two of
them that were easy to help, earning some repeat-business
potential brownie points.

The weapons manufacturer will not be able to differentiate a
steady performer who produces slightly above average every day
from the burst-mode performer who has some great, some terrible
days, and in manufacturing you need a blend of both to optimize
production in varying demand profiles.

In general: The bigger the organization, the more diseconomy
of scale, so the less efficient; the less efficient, the greater
the impetus for simpler, stripped-down systems to try to
redistribute energy away from qualitative tasks towards the
evaporating bottom line, and the more power the seduction of the
seemingly simple TOGN. The trend is has powerful allure to big
organization execs, from CFOs at free-trade advocating
multinationals to V.I. Lenin to Mussolini, all of whom are/were
big advocates of Taylorism and the application of simple metrics,
rigidly-enforced as a management technique.

Tip # 44: Don't be fooled. The seduction
of a TOGN is understandable. And TOGN schemes have some value.
But the TOGN is not the person; ignore that at your own risk.

In the next entry, I'll discuss a new example of the
average-is-the-person fallacy, as exposed by one of baseball research's best de-bunkers and dialogue stimulators, Don "Il Postino del Destino" Malcolm.

12/17/2003 08:28:00 AM posted by j @ 12/17/2003 08:28:00 AM

Tuesday, December 16, 2003

PART III: Approaches for Copingwith Sociopathic Bosses

In the last pair of entries I discussed in general
organizations run by a head-man who behaves like a sociopath, and
the Yankees in particular.

It's not a very common model, although a surprising number of
them move to the top of their field, and some even endure. The
Yankees have a wonderful record of success, and if you're a
stockholder, you probably think General Electric has a fair track
record (though if you're a buyer of any of their consumer
products, you almost certainly don't). Others, Like Sunbeam,
fail.

But what do you do if you are in an organization run like
this; how do you cope? I promised some partially-effective
approaches. There's nothing in my tool kit that's assuredly
successful. Here are my suggestions, in decending order of
effectiveness.

1. Don't ever hire on under any
circumstances. If you're up for a job in an organization
you don't work for, and the job is one someone just got fired
from, nose around. The head-man in a sociopathic organization
will be very seductive (and his henchfolk will, too). He may have
a good cop, a very empathetic co-dependent whose main purpose is
to bring in fresh meat to get chewed up. The good cop will tell
you the incumbent was incompetent, and they really need you to
bring some class to the organization. Some additional warning
signs: much higher than market scale pay; a sense of urgency;
reports oozing from the head-man and his good cop about this and
that incompetent who had to be let go; a level of pursuit that's
almost like flirting. The good cop will always be able to
convince herself that The Boss is about to turn a corner, and if
not, he'll at least have a toy to toy with who isn't her. If you
think there's even the vaguest chance the organization is
sociopathic, insist on getting evrything promised to you in
writing. To most sociopathic-acting bosses, signed
contracts, like any kind of accountability, are like garlic to a
vampire...not fatal but very repulsive, and you can out them with
the polite request for one. The ones who are true sociopaths,
btw, will go ahead and sign one anyway, not caring about the
consequences, so it's not a perfect strategy.

2. Get the heck out as soon as
you can do it on your own terms. It appears
the Yanks G.M. Brian Cashman is doing just that. Having come
up from a lowly office job to G.M. of a most successful
franchise, Cashman is now in a position to shop his services
elsewhere. There's not much more he can do in New York -- they've
won the Series with him in the position. Steinbrenner has worn
out Cashman's loyalty, if you can believe the story linked to
here. He has a good reputation, although some probably believe
anyone of reasonable skill could succeed given the Yankees'
resources. It makes sense for Cashman to move on and see if he
can prove himself with a franchise that doesn't behave as though
it has unlimited funds. Sadly, once a functionally-sociopathic
boss no longer has the power to fire you, he will almost
invariably try to mess with you in other ways...tarnish your
reputation, try to undermine other job opportunities, withhold
agreed-upon exit wages or threaten to go back on other
agreements. In the Yankees case, it looks like Cashman has to be
released to go elsewhere because Steinbrenner has an option on
him for another year after this one, and it's pretty common for
the functionally-sociopathic boss to resent an employee he likes
to terrorize escaping from his clutches, exposing his impotence.

3. Build a plan to overthrow
the head-man and save the organization. This has been my pattern. I don't
recommend it. Too much trouble and likely to fall on deaf ears. I
did succeed in helping to bring down one such boss who
behaved as though he was a sociopath, by making a point of
contacting every one of his serial victims and getting them to
write letters to the C-level guy the head-man reported to. There
were other factors, but because some of the victims had been
treated in a way many courts would consider sexual harassment and
because this man carried a concealed weapon sometimes, there were
enough cautionary indications that when the company had a thin
business excuse, they let him go, though it was after I was
already gone. The problem with this kind of rescue behavior is an
organization that deserved it would rarely have allowed a person
like this to run the lives of 100 people in the first place.

4. Don't be a "Tall
Poppy", and keep your exit plan current and polished.
The Australians have an expression, "Don't be a tall
poppy". It means don't attract attention. In the sociopathic
organization, acting fearless, refusing to respond to the
head-man's routines, makes you a tall poppy. Being entertainingly
fearful (in response to the head-man's initiatives), like asking
for reviews or asking how you can please him more by being better
or by cowering or hiding when he's in one of his (frequently
staged) rages or scolds also makes you a tall poppy. The model is
to act fearful, but in a moderate, boring way that doesn't
attract his attention. Don't run out of the room and hide, but
don't be conveniently near, either. And always have an exit plan
ready, evolving week to week. Plan on not being able to have a
reference from this company. Do good (not great) work; you don't
want to be recognized as an achiever, because the boss who
behaves like a sociopath will frequently sacrifice or simply
serially humiliate an achiever to terorize other employees. This
avoidance is a strategy I don't care for at all; I think it makes
people lose their edge, because once most people get used to
dogging it, it's harder to excel, to ratchet it back up. In the
Permafrost Economy, some people have so few choices that this one
becomes viable, though. It's conceivable you may outlast a
functionally-sociopathic boss without doing anyhting intentional
designed to shorten his tenure. This seems to have been the
survival model of choice for middle-class Iraqi people from the
late 1980s right up to today.

Brian Cashman probably has more options than you do, and it
seems to make him both more able and more willing to take abuse
from his boss. What would you do if you had his job?

12/16/2003 05:44:00 AM posted by j @ 12/16/2003 05:44:00 AM

Monday, December 15, 2003

PART II: Sociopathic Leadership,Yankee-style

In the first part I wrote about one strong indicator of
sociopathic leadership in the Yankee organization: the
intentionally insulting treatment of a long-time employee
regarded by his peers and observers as a key component of the
organization's success.

There's another clear indicator worth noting:

The extraordinary and public
disdain for the social norms the organization is
expected to follow, both internally and externally.
According to the NY
Times piece by Jack Curry I referred to
yesterday,

The Yankees, the
alone-on-an-island Yankees, did not send any of their top
executives to the winter meetings. George Steinbrenner
revoked General Manager Brian Cashman's ticket on
Thursday and he advised Damon Oppenheimer, a vice
president, to stop packing on Wednesday. Somehow, Gene
Monahan and Steve Donohue, the two trainers, managed to
sneak here and perhaps study the latest innovations in
treating strained hamstrings.

"George doesn't
want us to go there because we would give away our
secrets," one club official said. "There are a
lot of teams out there who don't really care about our
secrets."

That is not what the
increasingly obsessive Steinbrenner, the team's principal
owner, thinks. According to officials from the Yankees,
other teams and agents, what he thinks, feels and does is
what the Yankees think, feel and do these days. More than
ever, Steinbrenner, who is perturbed about three straight
seasons without a World Series title, is dominating how
the Yankees will take shape in what should be a hectic
2004 in the Bronx.

This is about the external norms. Teams go to the winter
meetings. By refusing to have what many observers think of as the
flagship franchise (highest income, highest expenditures, best
record of success in its league over the last decade) participate,
it sends a powerful message to all the other teams: your puny
formalities don't matter to us. It's an aggressive assertion
of difference, of superiority, of a lack of need to engage on any
terms but one's own. Perhaps on the surface it looks somewhat
narcissistic, and perhaps there are elements of that in the
recipe, but more than anything else, its a snub, an intention to
intimidate the rest of the league the way it intimidates staff,
done as a prelude to ultimate victory, like a pitcher doing the
fist pump on strike one.

Internally, if you believe the Curry story, Steinbrenner is
sending the same message. All GMs go to winter meetings. Except
Cashman.

As the World Series loss to
the Marlins unfolded, Steinbrenner criticized Cashman for
whatever went wrong on the field, according to a Yankees
official.

Steinbrenner's criticism of
Cashman has shifted to indifference in the off-season;
Steinbrenner has made player decisions without consulting
him. Cashman did not attend the winter meetings in 1999,
either, and after fighting Steinbrenner for permission to go
each winter, he did not fight him this year.

Like Torre, Cashman is in
the final year of his contract, and speculation about being
fired by Steinbrenner will surely follow both from spring
training.

This approach is a variant of the Management By Terror (MBT)
discussed in the previous entry, that is, keep everyone on edge
so each believes they could be fired at any moment. Steinbrenner
could just fire Cashman, or could just let Cashman go to the
winter meetings, but a head-man who is behaving like a sociopath
many times likes to toy with his minions so he can get the orgone
charge from watching the other staffers cringe, the press report
on it, the fans look on in amazement. The "public" part
of the public spectacle in most sociopathic organizations is
pretty limited beyond the staff & Board, but a high-profile
sports franchise just has so many tantalizing possibilities.

One other indicator worth noting. The current GM, Brian
Cashman, started in the organization at the lowest level, and was
pushed up via Steinbrenner Ex Machina. The Boss isn't stupid;
he's been promoting out of nothing a guy who is capable at this
point. Cashman is a smart cookie by every apparent measure. But
Cashman also owes everything to his mentor/tormentor, the
tormentor knows it. I've never spoken to Cashman, but I strongly
suspect he's basically loyal, a man of his word. I suggest that
because bosses who behave like sociopaths most frequently pick on
that type. It means the head-man can carry on the game farther
while the underling will hang on, loyal while being tormented.

There are four strong indicators in this case (the humiliating
purge of the popular contributor, the internal public displays of
disrespect and the external public displays of disrespect). There
are other indicators common to American organizations that
feature this form of leadership beyond these.

In the next entry, I'll discuss what (limited) options you can
take if you're in an organization run like this.

12/15/2003 07:23:00 AM posted by j @ 12/15/2003 07:23:00 AM

Saturday, December 13, 2003

PART I: Yankee Leadership,Sociopathic Leadership

The Yankees, as predicted by everyone who writes about or
analyses the team, have shot off the starting line this
off-season like a nitro-fueled funny car: bucking, fast, lots of
smoke, maximum sturm und drang. This accompanies the typically
controlling behavior by the head-man, behavior that looks to
trained observers (and should feel to his front office staff)
exactly like sociopathy.
To sportswriters, it looks typical of the indicted felon, but it looks
mysterious, as in this interesting NY
Times piece by Jack Curry.

In big American (and Russian, too, by the way) organizations,
this is a significant, though not majority, style of what's
called "leadership". I rarely write about leadership,
because while it can be significant in some large
organizations' trajectory, it's overhyped, a small subset of the management
toolkit, it's not something that can be taught or trained into
someone, and generally ephemeral (that is, in a rapidly-mutating
environment, a specific leadership style tends to be effective
only in specific, short-lived conditions, and few effective
leaders have, or are able to learn, multiple styles).

It's worth understanding. Some of you may work in
organizations run on the sociopathic style. Most of the head-men
in these organizations (there are some women leaders who behave
this way, too, but it's more a male style in American
organizational behavior) are not actually sociopaths; most are
people who behave that way because they learned it as a style,
frequently from a dominant family member, sometimes from an early
work or school experience. A code word, politically-correct,
you'll sometimes hear from the functionally-sociopathic leader is
"Machiavellian," but that's merely intellectual
packaging of sociopathy with a classical reference meant to
justify it. The Yankees right now are a clear road map of the
style, why it works, why it doesn't, and some of the indicators
you can use to recognize it.

Team head-man George Steinbrenner has a powerful need to win
(good for business) and a powerful need for attention (great for
business). He knows the attention works well as part of a
business model, keeping the team in the news during the
season-ticket deposit period. These two drives help keep the team
competitive, keep feeding income, the fuel for success, into the
Yankee organization. After three consecutive years without a
World Series trophy (NOTE: there are some
other teams that have gone three consecutive years without one),
Steinbrenner is priapic for publicity (now) and a trophy (late
next year).

The Yankees currently have almost every indicator of an
organization run by a sociopathic leader. Here's the first of a
few of the most obvious ones:

An intentional, public snubbing of long-time Yankee and beloved
(especially by women) pitcher Andy Pettitte.
The sociopathic leadership style requires MBF
(Management By Fear); part of the sociopathic
leadership style is to instill fear in everyone in
the organization. MBF can make some underperformers
who are slacking achieve at a higher level or leave
(most of the underperformers just hunker down until
the rage period is over, doing less -- to attract
less attention -- so the organization slows in its
work). Of course, it makes some high-performers lose
some portion of their focus (undermining performance)
and it de-motivates some high-performers. The net of
MBF in almost every organization (but not all) is
very negative.

The sociopathic leader can smoke whole groups of people to
make a point (for example, Joe Stalin, Jack Welch), or can take a
more surgical approach, isolating out a very-popular team member, viewed by
all staff as an key contributor and a positive influence, and
squash him flat as a bug in a public way, "showing"
everyone that no rational force is at work, and everyone better
get cracking, and they could be next anyway.

A leader like this will also use high-intensity praise and
bonuses and apparently heartfelt intimacy to amplify the employee
level of emotional investment in work and the organization, and
this investment, once made, is a fulcrum the sociopathic leader
can use to lever his manipulation more effectively. For that
reason, people in these kinds of organizations are subject to an
emotional roller-coaster, highs and lows, terror, followed by a
bit of praise or money or other recognition that gives hope
things have changed. The person who stays willingly in a
sociopathic organization is very much like a chronically-abused
spouse, filled with hope for a better future that will almost
certainly never come (exception: someone who's a sociopath
himself or someone who makes a life-changing amount of money out
the deal, like a Major League salary, they can choose to overlook
the effects).

Letting Pettitte go, by the way, was not necessarily
destructive for the Yankees' prospects, statistically. His spot
in the rotation is occupied by Javier Vazquez, a better, younger pitcher. Yes, there are arguments for
the superior utility of left-handed pitchers whose home field is
Yankee Stadium (Pettitte is a lefty, Vazquez a righty), but Steven Goldman's piece is a
most clear-headed and perceptive argument both about the baseball
and human truth of the Pettitte snub, and he makes pretty clear
the net of the change works in the team's favor. (BTW: If you're not reading Goldman
regularly, you should; his perceptions are broad as well as deep
and transcend just the on-field details -- into which he has
unusually good insight). It is a
little destructive of morale and commitment, but that's only the
personal workplace comfort of Yankee employees (players,
front-office staff, etc.) and may not, in the end weigh more than
the on-the-field edge the change makes.

It looks from the Berkshire Eagle piece I
linked to earlier in this entry that Pettitte took this piece of
organizational manipulation personally. Always a mistake -- when
you work for an organization as calculating as a
functionally-sociopathic one, it's best to buffer the emotional
content of your work.

Have you ever worked in a organization that
behaved this way, or do you perhaps work in one now? In the next
entry, I'll point out more Yankee examples of the indicators of
an organization headed by a sociopathic leader, and what people
do to try to cope with being in one.

12/13/2003 11:16:00 AM posted by j @ 12/13/2003 11:16:00 AM

Thursday, December 11, 2003

PART III - Where The Flubber Meets the Mode

In this entry I'm
going to ante up the tool I promised so you can actually do
something with this knowledge. It'll be familiar to any
experienced baseball G.M.s (real, sim-, and fantasy), but it's
not actually a baseball-specific tool.

When you're building
a competitive baseball team, it's not just important to gather
the best players you can. It's at least as important to blend
them together in a way that makes for the most
productive combination, with complementary attributes. A GM would
use a more complicated tool, but at it's foundation it's the same
as the one I talked about: rows for each position, columns for
each aptitude.

In the baseball
example, there might be columns for speed, left-handed hitting
power, left-handed hitting for on-base, hitting to all fields,
fielding, etc. Then, as you put in each player you already have,
you pour in the aptitudes into their respective columns,
indicating which players have which aptitudes. When you look to
add a player, you can see what it does to your overall mix.
Here's a truncated baseball example, the projected (as of today)
lineup for the 2004 Seattle Mariners.

Pos

RH power

LH power

OBA

Speed

Spray

Fielding

C

X

X

1

X

X

2

X

X

3

X

S

X

X

Lf

X

Cf

X

X

Rf

X

X

X

DH

X

X

X

You can see pretty quickly that they have limited power from
the right side, almost none from the left side, and not a lot of
outstanding OBA. There are players at two positions who bring
only a single strong aptitude to the table. And in trying to
improve the recipe, the easiest thing to do is replace the two guys who have only
a single aptitude. But there is a constraint here, because
the player at "Lf" is the only power from the left side
on the starting team. At a glance, you know what you have to
build on to get to a balanced offense. As I said, this is
truncated. It doesn't account for half the batters' factors you'd
like nor any of the pitching. But it's illustrative of the kind
of tool you could use for aptitudes.

In the last three entires, we've been talking about attitudes.
Below, I'll run a table of an organization I used to consult for
and show you how you might use it in that particular case, trying
to note the minority of rules that are universal . I've used
shorthand for the Dorfman/Kuehl winning attitudes for team
members (described more fully in the previous entry below).

Conscious

Source

Learn

Team

Enthuse

Open

Humor

Social

Empathy

Balance

Team

Criticism

B

x

x

x

x

x

x

R

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

D

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

W

x

x

x

x

x

x

B is the supervisor. From an attitude point of view, this team
as a whole has some obvious strengths and weaknesses. On
the good side, they are all dedicated to the success of the team
and the greater organization, and everyone but the supervisor is
open to change and understands the importance of learning. That
combination opens up a lot of possibilities. And you gotta hope
for that because except for the supervisor, they are absent the
ability to restrain criticism of co-workers, and there's only
middling enthusiasm (remember, I talked about how constant
complaint undermines aggressiveness). That needs to change. The
supervisor in this case is not the best hope to launch or captain
the changes needed -she's out of step on criticism (she's a
rah-rah, so her telling her employees to get with the joy is
likely to trigger a counter-reformation, not compliance. And
enerting what will be a tense situation (changing the criticism,
upping the enthusiasm), she doesn't readily use humor to break
the tension.

How would I design a project to improve the overall attitude?
This is my take. D is enthused but is also a person who
ciriticizes casually. I would enlist D's help, explaining the
enthusiasm and the casual criticism are at cross-purposes. I
would ask D to continue to criticize where (a) there's a good
chance for change, and (b) the change would make a real
difference to the team or organization. D, you'll note, cares
about both, and has empathy, which means D won't just be a jolly
airhead. D will be able to comprehend the criticism of others and
consciously direct it, focus it on important issues. And then
when D gets around to buffering criticism, it won't look like
jolly airhead behavior. I would have D focus on both co-workers,
but R most, because R has more components of winning attitude
already. Once W is standing out as an exception, he can conform a
little, conform a lot, or leave. If W is very disturbed, he may
choose to stay and resist, and that becomes an H.R. department
problem.

There are a trillion permutations here. In this example, once
D is enlisted (and with this set of attitudes, you will always be
able to recruit D) there are not multiple points that both R and
W have that D doesn't. If there were, that would be advantageous;
pick between R and W the one who has the most points in common
with D, and count on them to link to the remaining person through
those other points.

SUMMARY

An exercise like the very simplified baseball GM's aptitude
table is valuable for seeing what you need and for doing
trade/change/succession planning. And if you just spray the
attitude components on a table, you'll see some basic info about
group strengths and weaknesses. If you take more time and pay
attention, you can use the attitudes of individual team members
to complement, buffer and improve the attitudes of their
team-mates. In a reasonably healthy organization, you can craft
plans to improve attitude over time and not have to live with the
self-centered or hyper-complaining or change-resisting group.

Questions? Write me via the Contact Me link in the upper left
of this page.

12/11/2003 06:31:00 PM posted by j @ 12/11/2003 06:31:00 PM

Tuesday, December 09, 2003

Part II - Changes inAttitude = Changes in Latitude

In the last entry, I started talking about attitude of your
team members, one of the vital elements of any successful
management recipe, talked about some team social attitudes I had
experienced when I was reporting on baseball, and compared it to
some non-baseball situations. If you plan to read this entry and
haven't read that one yet, it's a necessary prerequisitie that
makes this one useful.

I promised a tool, because without a system you can apply,
management just becomes that fuzzy-but-lovely sizzle called
leadership.

A Steak in the Ground

To improve attitude, you need to first assess
the existing status of your group as a whole and of the
individuals within it. There are a lot of tools out there. I'm
going to give you this one from The
Mental Game of Baseballby Harvey Dorfman & Karl
Kuehl, modifed slightly (you know, slightly,
like election results from Georgia -- the ex-Soviet country, or
Georgia, the U.S. state with the problematic voting machines).

Evaluate each person on each of these. You can build a row-and
column model (like in a spreadsheet program or -- better -- on
paper. Working on paper will increase your learning and recall of
the patterns, the computer is more convenient and with a cleaner
looking result) with the staffers in columns across the top and
the Attitude components down the side.

First, I'll tell you the modified Dorfman/Kuehl components,
and then I'll give you hints about filling out the tool.

A Set of Components

*1. Conscious of one's attitude. That is, the player
has some perspective and knows and can tell you what
their attitude is and how it helps make an overall environment.

2. Ideas of where those attitudes came from. That is,
she can point out the experiences that were important in shaping
the attitude.

*3. Recognizes the critical nature of continual learning.

4. Dedicated to success of the organization & the
team.

*5. Behaving enthusiastically about daily activities.

6. Open to change. Is neutral or even positive about
proposed changes, publically displaying an attitude that things
can get more effective/better. An ancillary component is
understanding that being asked to change is not criticism (though
many times this neurotic connection between change/criticism is
the result of the manager's poor change management technique and
verbal ability).

%7. Able to use humor to relax self or group.

%8. Interest in the lives and work of team-mates, and
ability to serve their work needs and help them cope with their
work difficulties. And this can overflow into the non-work
life,m too, because sometimes what's preventing a person from
being effective at work is something outside of work, and if you
can help them with that non-work difficulty, their work
difficulties evaporate.

*%10. A balance between speaking and listening. That
is, contributing, but also absorbing the contributions of others.

*%11. Working/playing effectively as part of the team.
Being part of the group, and making the "groupness"
seem valuable to other members of the group. A critical component
of this is making outsiders welcome, that is, new employees or
people from other departments, presenting the idea, it's a real
honor to be part of this group and we're honored to include you.

**12. Keeping yourself from casually criticizing others.
This one is fuzzy, and therefore tough, because criticism is a
critical component for improvement. What I'm egtting at here is
the destructive habit of having more than, say 10% of
water-cooler, coffee-pot talk consist of what so-and-so should
have done and why. When this gets out of control (say, more than
about 15% of the communication) it cognitively sucks dead bears,
as they say at Arthur Andersen.

Symbols: **Super-critical, *Critical, %Glue that holds team
together.

The glue components mean a person with bad attitudes in one
area may be making an important positive contribution i to the
group's effectiveness, even if her other attitude components are
not good. And if the person has really bad attitude and is a
glue-factor, that person can really mess up a whole team by
transceiving negativity.

If you're new, or if you can't reel these off already (most
managers aren't evaluated on this kind of thing, so many don't
take the time to master knowing this kind of truth about their
reports), you might create exercises for having team-members
anonymously evaluate each other. I wouldn't use a previous
manager, or anyone up the chain of being, since they're likely to
have a distorted or limited point of view that they don't
recognize as limited (a dangerous combo). If the attitude is
alarmingly poor (that is, you believe attitude is a single piece
of the environment that is assuring failure where at the same
time, if it was C or C+, everything else would work out
positively, then self-evaluation could trigger a Rwanda-style
Hutu-Tutsi bloody war. In that case, I don't recommend it. In
that case, you'll need to enlist H.R. (even though Angus' Law of
Problem Evolution works here...usually, if they already had the
capability to fix the problem, it wouldn't be there...they'll
probably need a consultant or outside group to come in and work
the evaluations...contact me if you need some leads).

In the next entry, I'll make some suggestions of what to do
once you have your sheet filled out.

12/09/2003 07:56:00 AM posted by j @ 12/09/2003 07:56:00 AM

Sunday, December 07, 2003

Part I - Managing Players:Winning Attitude, Losing Attitude

This topic drifts dangerously towards the over-hyped realm of
what the popular business & sports press both refer to as
"Leadership", away from the realm I try to work with
people in: management. "Leadership," far too often is a
favorite topic because it's not measurable; if someone claims to
be a good leader, can you test their assertion? Possibly. I
haven't seen any good testing tools. I know the cluster of
aptitudes and practices that pundits call leadership exist and
that as components, you can work on them and in many cases become
better at them. Overall, though, the hyping of leadership is
driven by politically-successful American executives' proclivity
for avoiding any shred of accountability.

I do believe this area is important for managers and I have a
few practical tools I use. I call it managing, because it is, but
to your superiors, it will look like leadership, something you
can use to market your success.

The Rangers, The Orioles: Self
& Group

One of the vital elements of any successful management recipe
is the attitude of your team. In baseball, you can see it if you
walk into a clubhouse before or after a game. There are a lot of
different societies (some people call these "business
cultures"; fewer than 5% of organizations have an actual
"culture") in baseball. Some late-70s/early-80s
examples I'm familiar with from my baseball reporting days, and
you'll recognize them in non-baseball organizations you have
worked:

The Late 70s Texas Rangers: Everyone
is a free agent (emotionally...many of them were acquired
through that mechanism). Like recent employees of healthier
tech companies which have outgrown their beer/pizza
camaraderie and are now in a cycle of overseas outsourcing and
trimming the tangential benefits of line employees,
individual Rangers' attitudes seemed pretty uniform: hostile,
hard-working, joining together only to conspire against
outsiders or authority. Sort of faux-existential posing.

Early 70s to Mid 80's Baltimore Orioles:
Everyone is together. If one player has a bad day, it's
assumed it's everyone else's responsibility to pick up the
slack. If a player is dogging, it's assumed it's everyone's
responsibility to apply some pressure for him to concentrate
and deliver. The manager will take the heavy-lifting on
mistakes and laziness, but all pitch in.

Late 70's Atlanta Braves: We're
losers: the team can make money anyway. Let's play within
ourselves and do what can be done, but we're not going
anywhere. Don't sweat it.

Late 70's San Francisco Giants: I'm
like any other worker. I come to work, I go home. As long as
I do what's in my job description, I'm doing my job.

There are more models, but this gives you an idea of the range
and how closely they parallel non-baseball organizations.

Both in baseball and beyond, all human systems tend to be
self-amplifying. The young player (employee) who comes into an
organization with a given social norm will tend to gravitate to
that norm for acceptance. Those who find the norm unacceptable
are, probabilistically, more likely to leave the group. The
manager can redirect to some degree, but if she tries to do it
too suddenly or with too much force applied, she will trigger
what I call "an immune response". There are tools for
changing the pattern of a social norm, and I'll approach some of
those soon in another entry.

Attitude in workgroups can be a critical component that
decides success or failure. The standard "culture of
complaint" that is a norm in most big organizations is
exemplified by the rapid readiness to talk about what's wrong, a
general (not universal) unwillingness to change the subject when
solution discussions come up, a sense among the participating
individuals that they cannot trigger or contribute to enduring
change for the better. If you manage in such a social norm, you can
succeed, but it sure is a challenge. I encourage my clients to
give some time to attack the status quo while still working with
the social norm as it currently is and making sure you get your
work done. If you can create an island of healthy attitude, you
might be able to transform adjacent workgroups. Might...it's
not at all a sure thing, but it certainly is something worth
trying.

To use the tools, you first have to have a system of analysis,
a filter through which you examine "attitude". In the
next entry, I'll give you a solid model you can use. It's the one
developed by former A's "performance enhancement
counselor" Harvey A. Dorfman, and Karl Kuehl for their book The
Mental Game of Baseball. Their system is derived in part
from Maslow. I'm not sure it's the very best model, but it's
workable, and the important thing is to have a tenable system --
perfection isn't required.